(BA) NKJV

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24 July 2022

The NKJV, or New King James Version, is an edition of the Bible in English which intends to present a somewhat updated translation of the Bible in language as close as possible to that of the KJV.

For centuries, the King James Version of the Bible held de facto status as the Bible for English-speakers, despite various alternative efforts here and there. But holding on to it was an untenable position, as its language became ever more archaic, and the advances of biblical scholarship continued to shed new light on many passages in ways that its translators in 1611 could not have anticipated.

In the mainstream Protestant world, the KJV gradually gave way to a string of updates: the RV, the ASV, the RSV, the nrsv, and as of 2021 the NRSVue. But in conservative Protestantism, the KJV hung on a bit longer, and still does in some of the most conservative quarters. The NIV, which appeared in full in 1978, was for many of these conservative Protestants a more modern breath of fresh air. For some, however, it was seen as a step too far, but remaining with the KJV was also untenable.

The NKJV exists as a sort of compromise between these positions, rendering in a somewhat more modern English a translation very close to the KJV, replicating a number of the KJV's features like use of the Textus Receptus in the New Testament, but smoothing off some of its roughest edges. It appeared in 1982.

While in terms of the US "culture wars", the NIV, NKJV, and KJV are all on the right side of the spectrum, within the evangelical community itself the NIV is sometimes perceived as more "liberal" than the NKJV, while the most "conservative" version of all is the KJV.

As a scholarly effort, the NKJV is essentially a dead end. Its primary aims are what we might call liturgical, preserving the essential reading style of the KJV rather than any kind of thorough-going scholarly revision across the board. So while it does improve on the KJV here and there, it sits far behind translations like the NRSV and NJPS.

More recently, some of the target market for the NKJV, consisting of what we might call "very conservative" but not "extremely conservative" portions of evangelicalism, has moved over to the ESV.